U.S. Pat. No. 5,970,490 disclosures a method for processing heterogeneous data including high level specifications to drive program generation of information mediators, inclusion of structured file formats (also referred to as data interface languages) in a uniform manner with heterogeneous database schema, development of a uniform data description language across a wide range of data schemas and structured formats, and use of annotations to separate out from such specifications the heterogeneity and differences that heretofore have led to costly special purpose interfaces with emphasis on self-description of information mediators and other software modules.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,099 disclosures a schema discovery system and associated method to discover a majority schema for a set of related and similarly marked up documents, such as HTML documents, based on the assumption that though the structure of these documents is mostly for visual purposes, the keywords used in the documents along with the structural tags provide some hints, and allow a rough sketch of the underlying intended schema. With the assumption that albeit the set of HTML documents are marked up differently due to diverse authoring skills, they are closely related in content, it is reasonable to find a schema that can unify these different schemas, which schema is shared by the majority of these HTML documents. The system employs constraint rules on tree ordering to reduce the computational complexity in arriving at optimized XML DTD schema. These generalized XML DTD schemas may be used to perform automated comparison and evaluation schemes of profile documents on the WWW.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,782,379 disclosures an Identity System that delivers customized request responses that integrate the results of multiple programs. The Identity System receives and translates a user request. The Identity Systems employs a program service to identify all the programs required to complete the request. The Identity System uses an XML data registry to retrieve an XML template and XSL stylesheet for each program. The Identity System executes all of the programs for the request and organizes their results into a single data structure, based on the templates for each program. The Identity System then applies attribute display characteristics to convert the data structure into a single Output XML. The Output XML can be provided directly to the user or receive further processing using the retrieved XSL stylesheets.
A publication by Brahim Medjahed et al., as published in the VLDB Journal (2003) 12: 59-85 discloses that Business-to-Business (B2B) technologies pre-date the Web. They have existed for at least as long as the Internet. B2B applications were among the first to take advantage of advances in computer networking. The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) business standard is an illustration of such an early adoption of the advances in computer networking. The ubiquity and the affordability of the Web have made it possible for the masses of businesses to automate their B2B interactions. This paper, surveys the main techniques, systems, products, and standards for B2B interactions.
A publication by M. Arenas et al, as published in Computer Science Vol. 2453, pp. 269-278, 2002 discloses that data description for XML usually comes in the form of a type specification (e.g., a DTD) together with integrity constraints. XML Schema allows one to mix DTD features with semantic information, such as keys and foreign keys. It was shown recently that the interaction of DTDs with constraints may be rather nontrivial. In particular, testing if a general specification is consistent is undecidable, but for the most common case of single-attribute constraints it is NP-complete, and linear time if no foreign keys are present.